When I had been at balena for 12 months, I wrote a blogpost about my experience so far. That post allowed me to explore my own thoughts, but it also seemed to help other people inside and outside of the company to read about my experiences. So here's the next "exciting" installment.
2021 - 2022
Straight away I'm having to browse my calendar from this time last year, to try and remember what I was doing. And that's a good sign that I don't reflect back enough, and probably lose sight of things I have accomplished.
But here's a short list of things I've focused on in the past 12 months:
Interviewing
I've become much more involved with the hiring process at balena, especially running a system design task which we ask all candidates to do. I've really enjoyed hanging out with the candidates, and trying to help shape the hiring process at balena. I'm passionate about it being fun for everyone, the candidate and the balenista. I don't want any power dynamic, I want us to be hacking on something together, and seeing if we both feel like it's a good, two-way, fit.
Coaching
I've also spent a great deal of time trying to help some people at balena who need some extra guidance with their career and with things they are working on. Candidly I've found this hard, and I'm still trying to find my way here. I care about these people, and I want them to succeed, but I'm yet to find the way to efficiently help them do that. My early approaches saw me lose a LOT of my own time and energy, and begin to lose my way with my own work. Subsequent approaches have been too "hands off" and the relationship dwindles. Definitely a WIP.
Blocks
Blocks are like code packages but for containerised applications. It's not a concept I own or control, but I am a passionate advocate for it and chief cheerleader. I've continued to make some blocks, but mostly my focus in the past year has been about communicating about blocks and encouraging others to get involved. The number of blocks on hub.balena.io has grown from 5 to almost 40, despite a pretty terrible (soon to be sorted) experience for adding them there. I've also noticed the wonderful signs of the concept gaining momentum. People are PRing fixes and features to the blocks repos on GitHub. People are answering questions about blocks in the forums. Developers inside and outside of balena are using blocks and making blocks that could help others.
Labs residencies
Once it became clear, to a few of us, that the way people tried to onboard to balena was not fit for purpose, we decide to try another way: asking new joiners to spend a month in the labs making a project of their choosing. This became the labs residency programme. I wrote more about it here. Part of that programme is having experienced balenistas guide them, which I wrote about here. Candidly, this has been HARD. There have been times I have wished I hadn't started it. There have been times this caused me a significant decline in my mental health. But I think this might have been the most worthwhile use of my energy so far at balena. We're only 8 months into running this programme, but I'm hearing good feedback, I'm seeing new joiners finding their way inside balena with more ease, and the momentum is growing. Over the next 12 months I want the whole residency programme to be run and developed by the whole company, without any dependence upon me. And I want to see it to be expanded, to cover cases we haven't explored yet: such as people joining balena only to do a residency, while they build a product on balena, and then go seek funding for it. Like a product incubator. I'd love to see that!
Personal Growth
My technical skills are still growing all the time. I had never used Docker before I joined balena, so I've always had a steep learning curve here, and that's fine with me. I'm constantly getting myself involved in things I don't know how to do, and then working with others to do them. So naturally my technical skills continue to evolve.
But I'm actually more interested in how my non-technical skills are growing. Here's some things I've observed:
sunk cost and Occam's razor
When I am excited about an idea, like a toddler with a new crayon, I just have to go and work with it. My brain is obsessed and I'll get no inner peace until I've scratched the itch to hack on the idea. That doesn't mean I rush in without thinking it through - that happens all the time I cannot physically hack on it. My brain will be whirring through designs and solving problems every moment that I am not asleep. And then after a while I will have something I want to share with others. In the past when those people then gave me feedback, sometimes it would contain views that my thing was too complicated. Maybe they would question why some, or all, of it needed to be there at all. They would question if there was a "need" for something I had made.
On several of these occasions I experienced an almost "out of body" experience where I saw myself explaining why something was in my product, and realised I was defending it because of emotional reasons. I'd spent time making it. I remembered the hard work to get it to function. I had imagined a future user finding it useful and being happy. I had emotionally motivated reasoning for the thing, not a logical reason for the thing. A sunk cost.
I still do this, to a degree. But I am a LOT better at noticing when this is happening, and correcting myself. I try to implement the simplest thing, not the most configurable thing. And I've also noticed that I'm noticing where things can be simplified more often in other places within balena. For instance it occurred to me that checking references as part of the hiring process took up a lot of people's time (not mine) and never actually contributed to our decision to hire or not. So I advocated for us to stop doing that. I love the fact I can get involved anywhere in the company, advocate for change and that change happens if when we all logically agree, not because I am or am not more senior than someone else. :)
Assuming positive intent
This is another one I continue to get better at, but with more to do: assuming that someone's behaviour comes from a place of positive intent, and any aspects that seem negative are communicating they need more help.
There's something about my upbringing, or previous career experience, or both, that makes my brain sometimes jump to negative conclusions when someone does something I disagree with. Especially so if I am really convinced it's a behaviour that is counter to the culture we're trying to grow at balena. But by talking these events occur I make sure I talk them through with someone else, who's ability to see positive intent is more honed than mine (I'm looking at you Alison, Chris and Andrew) and actively try to challenge my own thoughts about the person and what happened.
More and more I am noticing my own thoughts can initially seize upon an event negatively, and then catch hold of themselves and course correct. I'm still not perfect, but I'm making significant progress here.
Optimise for fun!
I say this a lot, and my certainty that it's THE most important thing to focus on in work and life, is all the more resolute. Just as I am sure that only happy children learn to their potential, only happy people build products to their potential. I think there are only a very few things that are not made better by having fun whilst doing them (the dentist is NOT a fun place...). At balena hiring should be fun. Testing things should be fun. Meetings should be fun.
In my personal life I am determined that fun is priority numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4. Everything else is low down the list. My children's learning must be fun. There is a phrase we have at home: "it's fun, or it's not done" and both of my children are empowered to stop doing anything they find not fun. Same goes for me. :)
When we clean the house, we put loud music on, sing loudly, dance like nobody is watching and clean at the same time. When we wash the car, we have a hosepipe fight and giggle about spraying the hose over next door's hedge. Bedtime is spent enjoying reading stories together, the love of language, giggling at characters until we feel sleepy enough to sleep. It's fun, or it's not done.
What's next?
Well, I can't predict the future, so I don't know for sure. But a bit of staring into the void leads me to believe my path in the next 12 months looks something like:
- explore the boundaries of what we can do with the labs residency
- continue to push for improvements to the blocks developer experience
- get more involved in generating outreach content to communicate the balena culture
- experiment with ways of working more and more in the open
- MORE FUN!!!!!
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